


Abandoned in Place

by AcceleratedStall



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Cars, Exploration, Gen, Minor bad language, Non-Canon But Canon-Adjacent, Resistance (Half-Life 2), This is a bit self-indulgent I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 14:43:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16662805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AcceleratedStall/pseuds/AcceleratedStall
Summary: In a long-empty house on the highway out of City 17, a group of Resistance fighters takes a trip through the past. Expect misplaced nostalgia, absurd conversations, and... Bruce Springsteen?





	Abandoned in Place

**Author's Note:**

> When I first played Half-Life 2 I kind of fell in love with the setting - the game loves giving you little pauses where there's nothing to do but look around through the empty rooms, explore, and just think. I suppose it's the mark of a good setting, too, that I was always wondering about the other stories in it - what's behind that locked door? What were those rebels at the lighthouse base on Highway 17 doing before you got there? Who lived in that abandoned house and when did they leave? I suppose this fic is an attempt to channel that feeling I got into a written piece.

All four of them were dead tired. There were, of course, sound tactical reasons for leaving White Forest at two in the morning with the scout car’s headlights switched off - the Combine didn’t need to know how important the base there _actually_  was - but it had been four days on the road since, and still, nobody was sleeping right.

Case in point - belying its pallid light through the coastal fog, the sun sat at its midday highest, yet Pavel, the group’s erstwhile commanding officer, was snoring in the passenger seat, dead to the world. Behind the wheel, Phil stifled a yawn. He eased onto the brake as the car approached what looked like a fork in the road - to the right, the faded asphalt kept snaking along the shoreline, but to the left another road made a sharp turn, between the rocky hillsides.

The car rolled to a halt. A quick scan of the two routes showed the road to the left had been blocked by a landslide. Typical. No need to wake Pavel up for a command decision, at least. Still, it would be worthwhile to mark this on the map for future reference.

Phil turned a little in his seat and waved his hand towards the back seats. “Liz, hand me the map for a second?”

“Liz?”

He twisted around and looked into the back seat. It figured, she was asleep too. Toggle, who’d been monitoring four different radio sets in headphones for the last two hours and may as well have been asleep for how little she talked, took the map from the other woman’s lap and handed it to Phil instead. Rather surprising she heard him, really. Phil drew a big red “X” on the blocked road, and half-folded, half-crumpled the map into a hole in the car’s dashboard, where the original stereo used to be.

 

No further conversation was necessary, it seemed, as Phil put the scout car back in gear and the group headed north along the coastline. For a while, there was nothing to talk about anyway; just the mottled gray and blue of the sea fading into the cloudy sky, and a narrow strip of road that didn’t seem to be heading anywhere in particular.

At last a shape appeared further down the road. Some kind of building, not too impressive, probably just an old house. Phil steered the right front wheel of the car towards a pothole.

This had the intended effect of rousing Pavel. After some disgruntled mumbling in Russian, he pointed a set of binoculars towards the shape of the building in the distance. Toggle woke up Liz in the back seat, rather indelicately.

“No signs of life from here. We’ll go ahead on foot and radio back to the car once we can get a better look,” Pavel decided, reaching for an AR-2 as the car came to a stop at the side of the road.

 

On the shoreline side of the road, the ground fell away steeply, with the cracked pavement at the top of a gravel berm. Staying low, Pavel and Liz used it as cover as they crept toward the house. Phil and Toggle watched from the car as the two figures shrank and faded against the greys and browns of the earth.

It was only when a gruff “all clear, roll up” came through over the radio that Phil realized how tense he’d gotten waiting. They hadn’t seen anything more dangerous than a seagull in hours - but letting that make you cocky was how you got into trouble.

All four of them pulled up in what might have once been a driveway. “So, what have we got here?” Pavel asked, looking the house up and down. Two stories, wooden siding over a brick foundation, and a little garage building off to the side, all coated in dingy white paint. It was good sized too - combined with its location on the coast, whoever had lived here before the Seven Hour War must have made decent money. After over a decade of austerity under the Combine, the Resistance was all but built on scavenging, and there were very few buildings that they couldn’t find a use for. Even if it wasn’t in the right place to be all that helpful as a safehouse, perhaps it could be made into a supply cache, or a radio relay station. Or maybe they could reclaim some of the wood or the brick for use someplace else.

 

Still, first they had to get inside. All the ground-level windows were boarded up, and the doors were locked.

“Maybe we can get up to a second floor window somehow?” Phil suggested.

“I’m thinking a more direct route,” Pavel answered. He pulled a single bullet out of his pocket, loaded it into his revolver, and gave the cylinder a theatrical spin.

“Oh, come on, _really?_ ” Pavel pointed his weapon at the lock on the front door.

“Hold up!” Liz shouted, shoving the two men aside. She crouched down and lifted an ancient-looking doormat off the wooden boards of the porch. “Look what I found!” She stood up again beaming, with a rusty little key in her hand.

The lock turned, although not especially smoothly, beckoning the rebels inside in a flurry of dust motes.

“Really, it was the most obvious place to have looked. I can’t believe you guys.”

With the obstacle of the front door overcome, Pavel assigned Phil and Liz to search the house while he kept watch outside and tried to get into the garage. Toggle moved the car to the partial camouflage of some bushes and dead trees across the road from the buildings, and resumed scanning the radios. If need be they could still make a quick getaway.

 

Liz and Phil peered into the dark doorway, and found only stillness. Gingerly, gun barrels first, they stepped inside.

If there was one thing Phil couldn’t wrap his head around about being a rebel, besides the teleporter that he saw in Vance’s lab that one time, it was the _emptiness_. Escape City 17, and for every village that Overwatch troops holed up in and every house that was full of nothing but zombies, there were at least four or five where everybody was just _gone_. He tried to keep his guard up as they searched the first floor of the house, but the notion of finding any threats, or really any life at all, in the entire place seemed to be getting more and more ridiculous.

Liz must have thought so too, because as they burst into the kitchen together, Liz pointing her submachine gun at one corner of the room while Phil scanned the countertop through the sights of his AK-74, they held the pose for mere moments before catching each others’ eyes and falling into laughter.

“I knew they’d make a soldier out of you! Those saucepans wouldn’t have stood a chance!” chuckled Liz.

“Only because you so skillfully covered the other door to hold off the sofas in the next room,” Phil responded. “Anyway, you see anything non-perishable in here?”

“Ehhhh….” The room was dim, with only narrow shafts of natural light seeping through the boarded windows. Liz waved a small flashlight around the kitchen, its unsteady little beam jumping from corner to corner.

“Here, let me help.” Phil produced a screwdriver and set to work prying away the boards. With a wooden _crack_ a beam of white light flashed across the kitchen.

 

There was something on the refrigerator, that they hadn’t noticed before - papers. Phil took a closer look. Wavering lines of purple and green ink, steered by an unsteady hand, formed shapes - no, symbols. A box with a lopsided triangle on top made a house, three lines topped by a smiling circle made a person, and maybe that pile of circles was a car? Some of them had writing as well. Phil was useless at reading Cyrillic at the best of times, so deciphering a child’s handwriting was out of the question - but he could definitely tell where the writer ran out of space on the page and tried to cram in a whole bunch of letters awkwardly on one side.

Liz had joined him at the refrigerator at some point while he was looking. “Wonder where the kid is now,” she thought aloud.

Phil had wondered the same thing, but left the question unspoken, not only because it was unanswerable but also because most of the likely outcomes were unhappy to think about.

“Anyway, that bottled water looks like it’s still sealed, so we can use that. Also I found some canned beans,” she continued.

“Why is it always beans anyway?”

“Search me.”

Phil ran his fingers carefully under the edges of one page, looking to find the tape holding it in place.

“What are you doing?” Liz asked.

“Now that the window isn’t covered the sunlight will ruin the ink,” he replied. “Have to find a place for them out of the light.”

“Why?”

He searched his brain to find the reason but all Phil could say was “I don’t know.”

 With all drawings safely stowed inside the refrigerator (as far as they could tell, it had been broken for at least a decade, so that was as good a use for it as any) Liz and Phil headed upstairs.

 

The bedrooms upstairs left them feeling somewhere between voyeurs and archaeologists. Boarded up though it might have been, someone must have intended to return to this place, because there were lives left behind in here. A closet revealed a rack full of moth-eaten, musty clothes - a pity, Phil thought. Most every Resistance member was eager to find clothing that wasn’t the Combine-issued blue denim, decades out of fashion or not. A whole wardrobe in good shape would’ve made the trip worthwhile on its own. While Phil attempted to determine whether any of it was salvageable, Liz’s voice came from the other side of the room. “Hey, I found a record collection!” she announced brightly.

For the moment he didn’t turn her way, but still replied, “Yeah? They got _Darkness on the Edge of Town_ in there?”

“What?” Liz paused and turned towards the closet.

“Look, I’m from New Jersey, I gotta ask.”

“Really? You don’t have the accent.”

Phil finally pulled his head out of the closet to look back at his companion. “There’s more to Jersey than the accent, you know. Or… was more, at any rate. Hell if I know what the place looks like now.”

“Maybe the accent is all that’s left,” replied Liz.

“That’d be a shame. Buddy of mine had a New Jersey Civic Pride Day every year. I could show you all the highlights.”

Liz seemed amused. “Such as?”

“Thomas Edison’s old lab, the Pulaski Skyway, the Cape May Lighthouse…” Phil paused for a moment. “Bruce Springsteen?”

“That’s a person, not a place.”

“Still counts,” retorted Phil.

“Actually, what happened to him, anyway?” Liz put a finger to her chin in contemplation.

“What’s the most blue-collar working-class way to die in an alien invasion?”

“This is why I can’t stand talking to you,” Liz said jokingly. “Your friend sounds like a riot though.”

“He joined the CPs.”

“Oh.”

The dust hanging in the air suddenly felt twice as heavy.

 A pause, and then Liz found a way to change the subject. “Stuffy as hell in here. Think we could get a window or two open?”

Phil crossed the room and peered through the dirty glass of the bedroom window. Waves crashed on the beach out the window; it wasn’t a bad view if enjoyed from a distance, but nobody was eager to find out whether the antlion tunnels extended this far up the coast. He gave a few experimental pushes to the window frame to no effect; adding his other hand and throwing his upper body into it didn’t help either.

“It’s stuck,” he said, and immediately felt a little silly for stating something so obvious aloud. “Well…” He shook a hammer out of his rucksack and held it a few inches clear of the glass. “Stand back, would you?”

Liz turned to him with a start. “Don’t you think that’d be a bit of a shame?”

Another pause. “Yeah, I suppose so.” The hammer was stowed away again. “Gonna go find a different window, though.”

 

Phil moved to the other bedroom across the hall, its door opening with a creak. As soon as he took his hand off the door, it began to swing shut again; he caught it once more and pushed it back with another creak. Something on the floor caught his eye. Of course whoever lived here would have some kind of prop to keep the door open; in this case, it was just a brick, but its face was painted to look like a smiling little man, dressed perhaps as a bellhop?

The window in this room was easier going; it came loose with a few shakes, rattling the glass and admitting a cool, vaguely salty breeze. Phil gulped down the fresh air like wine; they’d been inside longer than he’d realized. He’s tempted to lie down on the bed, notwithstanding the poor condition of the sheets and blankets, but with a rifle and pack slung over his back, it wouldn’t actually be very comfortable.

Instead, he noticed a clock on the wall, its face made from an old hubcap. Its hands were frozen at about 5:35, but for some reason, Phil thought, he wanted to get it moving again - perhaps just to say, “I was here?” As he reached for it, a sharp _thwack!_ came from the other room. He jumped, forgetting the clock and reaching quickly for his AK-74.

“Calm down, idiot, all I did was get this window open,” Liz shouted from the other room.

“Sure, sure,” Phil walked back over to her, his heartbeat slowing back down to normal.

 

As he approached a voice floated in from outside. “Liz, Phil! I found something cool!” Pavel yelled. Apparently he’d just pried open the garage doors.

So Liz and Phil piled back down the stairs and outside - Phil had no idea what exactly constituted “something cool” in Pavel’s mind, but he had to admit he was curious.

Behind cardboard boxes and cans of paint and two rusty bicycles at the far wall of the garage was a car. And not a car like their scout car, cobbled together from the pieces of four different Subarus and missing all its doors and roof, or even a burnt out shell of a car like the ones all over the roads around City 17 - this, to Phil’s delight, was a _real_ car, a pre-Seven Hour War car. He couldn’t restrain himself.

“Holy shit guys, an RS200!” He ran up to it, disregarding the puzzled looks of his squadmates.

“Doesn’t look like much to me,” Liz said skeptically.

True, the tires were faded gray-brown and probably totally shot, the white paintwork was so dusty as to be more of a medium tan, and there was no telling how ruined the interior and mechanicals were.

“Well, no, I guess not,” Phil replied. “But this was one of the coolest rally cars of the eighties! Four-wheel drive! Double wishbone suspension! Turbocharged, fuel injected… I had a Matchbox car of one of these when I was like seven. Always wondered if I’d ever see one, they only made a couple hundred.”

“What’s a matchbox car?” Pavel asked, as Phil leaned down to look at the car up close.

“Toy cars in little boxes. The boys in my second grade class got really mad when I said they were lame,” supplied Liz.

This, if anything, only left Pavel looking more confused.

 

Before the car conversation, such as it was, could continue, Toggle appeared at the garage door. “Hate to interrupt, but I’ve got news. We may be in for a long day.”

The four of them headed back outside and over to the scout car.

“Overwatch just raised their alert level to max out of friggin’ nowhere. They called up about eight reserve battalions of soldiers in the last fifteen minutes, wanted all of them ready for action on arrival. Two dozen striders being airlifted to City 17. Gunships, helicopters, the works,” Toggle explained as they walked.

Pavel cursed in Russian. “What the fuck _for?_ ”

“Only codes I could make out referred to a Citadel security breach,” she answered.

“What? How would that even happen?” Liz cut in.

“No idea,” replied Pavel. “Hell, might not even be one of ours. They would’ve briefed us at White Forest if they were planning anything too crazy.”

“Well I guess we may as well ask,” suggested Toggle. “What’s our callsign today?”

Pavel flipped through a little handwritten notepad, grumbling. “Wavetop three-nine.”

Toggle hopped into the car and set to fiddling with the radios; soon one of them came to life with a burst of static.

“Wavetop three-niner to Black Mesa East with request,” she spoke clearly.

The others watched with rapt attention. It felt a little odd, Phil thought, to try and shift back to professionalism after rummaging around that old house for so long.

Finally there was an answer. “Wavetop three-niner, go ahead,” a scratchy, but calm, voice answered.

“We’d like an intel update on the Sector 17 Overwatch general mobilization if available.”

“Well, I guess it’s not going to stay a secret for long,” replied the radio, the collected tone of the Black Mesa East operator giving way to just the barest hind of excitement.

“Gordon Freeman has returned.”


End file.
